Thus spoke the youthful Radovan Karadžic, the poet and psychiatrist who, as the leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the early 1990s, became the chief architect of their "ethnic cleansing" policy. His extreme version of Serbian nationalism justified the mass expulsion of civilian populations and the murder of over 100,000 people. Although indicted for genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague in 1995, Karadžic was arrested in Belgrade and sent to The Hague after 12 years living as a New Age guru lecturing on alternative medicine and writing for the magazine Healthy Life.
Karadžic's capture closes a chapter in the Balkan tragedy of the '90s. It is of major symbolic and political significance for the chances of overcoming the legacies of war in Bosnia. And while it reveals the effectiveness of international leverage on Serbian politics, it leaves a number of open questions about the future prospects of the "Europeanization" of the Balkans.
It was Karadžic who, in October 1991, threatened the Bosnian Muslims with "extermination" if they declared independence from the rump Yugoslavia dominated by Slobodan Miloševic. Thus, Karadžic's capture is, first of all, of major significance to the victims and their families. With over a hundred thousand dead in Bosnia and nearly half of the population displaced, the country could not embark on a genuine healing process so long as the perpetrators were not brought to justice.
The military intervention and the Dayton Agreement of November 1995 stopped the war and produced a sort of stalemate: a truce established through the separation of the three communities (Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Croats) while the country remained under international protectorate. To move from truce towards political cooperation and a more integrated polity requires a minimum of trust. The confrontation between the war crimes and the individual responsibilities for the genocide are a vital step in that direction. It will allow Bosnians to overcome the logic of collective guilt and an all-pervasive discourse of victimization; force the Serbs to confront the criminal side of nationalist extremism; and encouarge the international community to reflect upon the responsibilities that come with a mandate to protect civilians in so-called "safe zones" (which, in actuality, provided little safety).